The shortest day of the year flickr photo by .^.Blanksy shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
I wrote 25 poems over 25 days with a Winter Solstice theme, using mentor poems as inspirational texts. Each day, I recorded audio of my poems. Here is the entire collection, if you are interested. The file names are by date of publication, as I didn’t give the poems titles.
Another view of the entire calendar, with text and audio, is here.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
This poem, for today, the Winter Solstice, is part of a larger collection of daily poems inspired by mentor texts that were curated by a National Writing Project friend, Deanna. I am trying to write one poem each day, as an advent calendar of sorts of poetry for winter. Today’s poem is inspired by Winter Solstice by Ray McNiece.
I’ve been writing and then recording audio of my poems but today — on the actual day of Winter Solstice — I decided to go a bit further, using an app for visual text, and voice, with soundtrack.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
winter solstice flickr photo by nosha shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
I’ve been writing Winter Solstice poems each day this month, using mentor texts as my inspiration. Here is today’s poem (and take a listen to my audio):
The lantern swinging
bearing down, pressing the dark
to a sliver …
– Tobi KassimI am imagining
pinprickssmall darts
of glittering lightStories unfolding
where context
is everythingAnd I – I know
nothingI am reader, observer,
listener, writerand there he is,
penning his way through
another constellation
altogetherI weather the uncertainty
and wonder if he, too,
sees my lightInspired by A Blind Spot, Awash by Tobi Kassim
https://poets.org/poem/blind-spot-awash
To see the entire collection as I am building it, here is the link. And note that the mentor poems comes from Deanna’s collection for writing inspiration.
Peace (and dark and light),
Kevin
Sommer’s basteln flickr photo by Isaszas shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
I continue to write a Solstice-themed poem each day this month, inspired by mentor poems shared by my friend, Deanna, at her Solstice Advent Poetry Calendar. I would not say all of my poems are directly related to Winter and the Solstice, but they are the soft heartbeat behind the writing.
I have long found the method of reading a mentor poem, then pulling out and centering on a single line or evocative phrase, and then writing a poem riffed off that original is a creative and productive method for me. It’s as if my poem response is swirling around the original, even if the line I have borrowed is not the true center of the mentor poem (often, it isn’t).
Here is today’s poem (inspired by a line in a poem by Sara Teasdale) and here is a link to my own calendar, as I share words and voice.
They took the wind and let it go
— Sara Teasdale
I become all pocket
when you
become jacket
This gale wind, captured,
sure makes such
a racket
in protest
toward surrender –
no matter the outcome,
remember:
nothing makes us
happier than when
chaos will cease,
jiggling with change,
in the moment
before release
Inspired by Places (iii. Winter Sun) by Sara Teasdale
https://poets.org/poem/places-iii-winter-sun
Prompt via Winter #SolsticePoem Prompts (via Deanna): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZjzQCxAlSozwsiWI-KBWYmTv6AdFEME4V9AQwrATcnE/present?slide=id.p
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
My National Writing Project friend Deanna has shared out another wonderful collection of writing prompts for poetry for December, this time with the theme of the Winter Solstice. I am trying to use her daily poem prompt for my own writing, and gathering the words — and audio, when I can — to a collection on a calendar, Advent-style.
See Deanna’s mentor poem prompts (and maybe use a few for your own writing).
Peace (and poems),
kevin
I’ve been making comics in the form of poems (or poems in the form of comics) periodically this past month as part of an invitation by Grant Snider (of Incidental Comics) to be creative. Grant makes very interesting comics, full of thought and literary themes. Mine were all over the place but still fun to make (I made mine in an app while Grant hand-draws his).
I gathered the collection into a single video for curation.
Peace (and poems and comics),
Kevin
I saw in my RSS feed that Eric Curtis, whose sharing of technology resources is always fantastic and useful, had mentioned that Canva had just launched a Text-Image AI tool, in which you feed it some words and it generates some images. This image generation feature has become a fairly common feature of AI these days, but I was still curious about how to use it within the platform of Canva (which has a slew of useful design tools and options).
Since this tool is still in beta (I believe), the link is not within the main Canva toolbox quite yet, so this is how you access it: https://canva.me/text-to-image
I grabbed a haiku I had written earlier in the say (off a prompt via Mastodon, with the word “mist” as a key inspiration) and fed it into the Canva tool. Full phrases were less useful than key words, I found, but the images were quite dreamy and evocative (I chose a “painting” setting in the tool).
I played with the Canva video maker tool, weaving the words of the original haiku through the video slides with the AI images, and choosing a piece of music (all within Canva itself) to create the short video poem. I utilized some other design features inside Canva, too, but the images were all AI-generated. It’s still strange to have AI as your creative partner in these things, but it’s interesting, too, to see where AI might offer up useful ideas or not.
To see how it works, read through Eric’s post. It is very detailed and helpful.
Peace (and AI),
Kevin
Cartoonist and illustrator Grant Snider put out a call for comics for what he is calling Poetry Comics Month, and I am periodically joining in.
Peace (in rhymes),
Kevin
I was intrigued by the prompt over at Open Write this weekend for a One-Word Poem. You can see mine above but I was curious how a word becomes a poem or a poem takes on the form of a single word, and whether there was push-back on the notion. What I noticed many of us in Open Write did was add a title to the poem (thereby, sneaking around the one-word rule).
I broke my word into three parts and then made a visual, hoping that the art element would add to the sense of connect/disconnect.
Over on Mastodon, John J. suggested (after remembering a book he once read) that one word poems work best when they are placed artistically on the physical page, so that placement and rotation and other elements play a role in making a single word a poem. I agree.
Learn more about One Word Poems via Poetry Foundation here and here.
Peace (and poems),
Kevin
And it happened. Two hour delay today …
Cartoonist and illustrator Grant Snider put out a call for comics for what he is calling Poetry Comics Month, and I am periodically joining in.
Peace (and winter),
Kevin